A Piece of Chalk
By: G. K. Chesterton
Transcribed by John Ainsworth ainsje00@wfu.edu
(Published in "Tremendous Trifles", Methuen and Co Ltd, London, 1909.
Originally appeared in the DAILY NEWS, November 4, 1905.)
I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer
holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing
nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up
a walking-stick, and put six very bright-colored chalks in my pocket.
I then went into the kitchen (which along with the rest of the house,
belonged to a very square and sensible woman in a Sussex village), and
asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper.
She had a great deal; in fact she had too much; and she mistook
the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper.
She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must
be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do;
indeed it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity.
Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and
endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw
pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least;
and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of
tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively
irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw
she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently supposing
that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper wrappers
from motives of economy.
I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I
not only like brown paper, but I liked the quality of brownness
in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods,
or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper
represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation,
and with a bright-colored chalk or two you can pick out points of fire
in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first
fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said
(in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown paper
in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical
are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife,
for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things
in my pockets. But I found it was too long and the age of great
epics is past.
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With my stick, my knife, my chalks, and my brown paper, I went
out on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal
contours that express the best quality of England, because they
are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them
has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses,
or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth
of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.
As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly
as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake.
The villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see,
for centuries: yet the lifting of the whole land was like
the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away.
I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place
to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going
to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim,
and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right,
and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green,
and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well
in bright colors on brown drawing paper. They are much better
worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw.
When a cow came slouching by in a field next to me, a mere artist might
have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds.
So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking
before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver,
and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all beasts.
But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape,
it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me.
And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the old
poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.
They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills;
but they sat on the great hills to write about it. They gave out
much less about Nature, but they drank it in, perhaps, much more.
They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow,
at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of
their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets.
The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live
green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten
skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went
in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.
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But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper,
it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left
one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind.
I searched all of my pockets, but I could not find any
white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted with philosophy
(nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing
on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential.
I cannot avoid remarking here on a moral significance.
One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals,
is this, that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color;
it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red,
as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows
red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars.
And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best
religious morality, of real Christianity, for example,
is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious
morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence
of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid
and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.
Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge
or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun,
which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean
abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming,
like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors;
but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily,
as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realized
this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it
were really true that white was a blank and colorless thing,
negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead
of black and grey for the funeral of this pessimistic period.
We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless
silver linen, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies.
Which is not the case.
Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.
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I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town
nearer than Chichester at which it was even remotely probable
that there would be such a thing as an artist's colorman.
And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would have been
as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it.
I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients.
Then I suddenly stood and roared with laughter, again and again,
so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man
in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hourglass.
Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought
some salt water with it with him for some chemical experiment.
I was sitting in an immense warehouse of white chalk.
The landscape was made entirely out of white chalk.
White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky.
I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on; it did not
mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the effect.
And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realizing that this
Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition
and a civilization; it is something even more admirable.
It is a piece of chalk.